Monday, November 15, 2010

Had some guests doing the show this weekend, Coopa Blu and friends. I joined them later on Saturday night at Jam, a monthly night at Grand Central on Ponsonby Rd. It's a mad concept - you take 5 DJs, let em play two records each, then switch to the next DJ. Two for two, the whole night, from 8pm til 5 in the morning. It was hilarious. I even got to play Poi-e, and people danced and sang along. How cool is that? Anyways, here is the playlist from Coopa Blu,...

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

There's been some great reading pop up recently on the issue of music archives, and saving our musical history from disappearing. Andrew Dubber has a site called Deleting Music, which is a sober reality check. One of my favourite posts there is about Uchenna Ikonne...

"Nigerian news outlet 234Next has a great article about Uchenna Ikonne, a man who is preserving and archiving the history of Nigerian popular music of the past 50 years – and reissuing it on his label, Comb & Razor Sound. Some really great and noteworthy things about US-based Uchena Ikonne...

1) He’s a real digger

I remember when I first started telling people in Nigeria that I am looking for old records and stuff like that.
They told me, “You can’t find that kind of thing in Nigeria today.” My reply was “No, you mean YOU can’t find it… I can!” And they would say “Ha! You won’t see that sort of thing in the market o!” The market? Are you kidding? Who is looking at the market? To find this stuff, you need to go ‘under’ the market! For months on end I would be rummaging through dark and filthy storage spaces, day in and day out. Getting sinus infections from the dust and mould… digging through urine-soaked garbage and getting bitten by rats. And in the end, when I show all the material I’ve gathered, people always ask “How did you find this stuff?” as if I’m a magician. But really, it’s all right here under our noses!

Simon Grigg writes on "the quickly evaporating New Zealand musical past." He talks about setting up a Music Archive. We already have the National Library collecting NZ recordings, but this is more about preserving not only recordings but master tapes and associated material and making recordings available to the public.

Simon has a shockingly big list of local releases post-1974 that are out of circulation or in very poor quality CD reissues - things like Miltown Stowaways and the Unsung Records catalogue, and there's at least 8 albums from the Deep Grooves label on there too, which, if people could gte to discover them would prove that Auckland did the funky-regggae-dance-thang over a decade before the Welly reggae sound leapt onto the scene.

"Slice of Heaven, the new Te Papa permanent installation, is a frustrating space for a historian concerned with twentieth century New Zealand heritage and identity and music's role in it.... Our music history is there but it begins (and ends) with 1950s rock n roll. They clearly didn't speak to Chris Bourke. Blam Blam Blam’s No Depression in New Zealand can be heard behind one early 1980s film segment (but not the Springbok Tour one)..."

A lot of the discussions around this area remind me of what I love about Wax Poetics magazine - they dedicate their mag to uncovering recordings and delving deep into the story behind them - who recorded them, who played what... A lot of that is solving mysteries around records while the folk involved are still living.

And with that, I'm off for a blog holiday. Blogging will resume in a month. Maybe. I'll still be posting music links, MP3s and so on over on Twitter, if you're up on that particular malarkey, tune in.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Hot on the heels of the launch of Chris Bourke's book Blue Smoke (on NZ popular music from the end of world war one to 1964), is a book that focuses on local female musicians, called Kiwi Rock Chicks, Pop Stars and Trailblazers.

"They are a very diverse lot," Chapman says. "When the book was first mooted, I was going to have a lot more authorship of it," Chapman explains.

"I would have been writing about the women and I would have had far less direct input.
When I received all this enthusiasm from the women I had approached, I thought the focus should change, making it less of me and more about them writing about their own experiences.
"I'm a music academic but, first and foremost, I'm a fan..."

BEAT SPECIAL 2: New music from the Hip Drop, beats and grooves from local producers and beat makers. Grab it here. Preview it below. It's a tasty mix of bent electro, bleepy hiphop and warped funk. Like it.

Down to the wire is a great site presenting the history of the internet in NZ, year by year starting in 1989.

There's some great interview snippets, like Richard Ram talking about Flying Nun's Oz partner Mushroom, getting Roger Shepherd hooked up to email,and suggesting he group his emails together and send them over once a day. Seriously.

Also commentary from Russell Brown, Greer McDonald, Jack Yan and others talking about their own experiences. All nice short clips too. There's some fascinating contributions too from readers down the right hand side of each page.

I was even reminded of Pelican Bar in Elliot st, run by the Wood brothers, which had a few computers sitting on the bar top hooked up to the internet (I recall playing some insanely packed shows there with the Picassos). The Wood brothers got out of bars and set up an ISP, Ihug, which did pretty good for them!

Snip: "Journalist Russell Brown recalls that, on a slow news day, all he had to do was call Nick Wood and keep him on the line until he, invariably, said something controversial – and a story was had."

Speaking of the Nun, each new daily post comes with a free MP3 from the Nun's archive - so far there's been 3Ds, Dimmer, JPSE, Look blue go purple, Bressa creeting cake and more. Great way to make yourselves a Flying Nun mixtape to boot.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

"The final installment of our "ThisCulture" film series brings you a special series of films focusing on New Zealand music produced by the crew from "Film The Music". The feature film is a brand new documentary shot at "Splore 2010". We will also be screening a selection of short documentaries from "Film The Music" and holding a Q&A session with their producer Jennifer Raoult.

"FilmTheMusic is a collaborative project created by two french filmakers and photographers, Jennifer Raoult and Sebastian Grounauer, who share a common passion for music and arts. We love to create unique moments of interaction with each artist consisting in short improvised video sessions, set in unexpected environments, No script, No rehearsal.

Extended bio and more

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Submissions for this blog are currently closed as I get emailed with dozens of submissions daily, almost all of them for genres I have no interest in. This policy may be revised at a future date, when the quality of submissions improves.